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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Non-Parametric Machine Text Detection via Multi-View Gaussian Processes

Adversarial conditions such as paraphrasing and targeted style transfer sharply degrade the accuracy of machine text detectors. A document, however, carries multiple complementary signals (e.g., stylistic features, likelihood and rank-order features, and structural features), and an attack that suppresses one may leave others intact. While a parametric classifier can learn to combine these features given sufficient supervision, classifiers are prone to making confidently incorrect predictions when the distribution shifts (e.g., novel attacks or unseen language models). To address this, we propose a multi-view, non-parametric detection framework that extracts complementary feature views from the same document and aggregates per-view evidence through a Gaussian process ensemble. By aggregating evidence across views, an adversary must simultaneously defeat multiple independent axes of detection, substantially raising the cost of evasion. The Gaussian process formulation additionally provides calibrated probabilities and principled abstention on out-of-distribution inputs, supporting reliable deployment in high-stakes settings. We evaluate on three benchmarks spanning diverse generators and attacks: the DetectRL and RAID benchmarks, and the PAN2025 shared task and demonstrate that our multi-view detector maintains strong performance under the considered attacks, outperforming existing approaches against held out attacks.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

PACUTE: Phonology-, Affix-, and Character-level Understanding of Tokens for Filipino

Large language models (LLMs) process text as sequences of subword tokens, which can obscure the character-level and morphological structure that underlies word formation. This limitation is most acute for languages with non-concatenative morphology, where standard tokenizers systematically misalign token boundaries with morpheme boundaries. We introduce PACUTE, a diagnostic benchmark of 4,600 tasks designed to evaluate morphological understanding in Filipino, a language characterized by productive infixation, reduplication, and diacritic-driven lexical distinctions that are typically absent from written text. PACUTE includes a hierarchical diagnostic framework of six compositional levels that localizes where morphological understanding breaks down. Evaluating open-weight LLMs and frontier commercial models, we find that open-weight models perform near chance on morpheme decomposition regardless of scale. Frontier models perform much better, often recovering individual affixes under contains-match scoring, but remain far below their character-level ceilings on compositional tasks of morpheme transformations and syllabification. These results identify productive morphological composition, rather than character access alone, as the persistent bottleneck for Filipino word-structure understanding.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Formalizing and Mitigating Structural Distortion in LLM Attention for Zero-Shot Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for reasoning over Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs). However, applying LLMs to graphs requires linearizing their structure into sequences, introducing distortion rooted in the graph bandwidth problem. While this distortion has been shown to degrade performance, it is often attributed to prompt design or model scale, leaving the underlying mechanism unclear. In this work, we show how rotary positional embeddings turn graph linearization into bandwidth-dependent attention decay, suppressing attention between graph-adjacent nodes that are forced far apart in the serialized sequence. This shifts the focus of LLM-based graph reasoning from prompt engineering and scaling toward correcting attention misalignment. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Graph-aligned Language Attention (GaLA), a lightweight, inference-time modification for LLMs. GaLA biases attention toward graph-adjacent nodes while preserving the LLM's sequential inductive biases. Across TAG benchmarks, GaLA improves performance with negligible overhead, demonstrating that distortion is a correctable bottleneck in LLM-based graph reasoning.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Conditional squeezing induced by a two-level system: arbitrary-time Magnus coefficients in the quantum Rabi model

arXiv:2508.03506v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a systematic Magnus expansion treatment of the quantum Rabi model beyond the Rotating Wave Approximation. We show that at the second order of Magnus series, the second-order evolution operator contains a term that induces conditional squeezing of the field mode depending on the state of the atom, in addition to the energy shifts. We analyze the scaling behavior of the conditional squeezing coefficient for $^{87}\mathrm{Rb}$ $5^2S_{1/2}\rightarrow5^2P_{1/2}$ transition line and show that the slow envelope of the squeezing coefficient is maximized at half-detuning cycles, and that it scales with $\frac{4g^2}{\omega_0|\Delta|}$. We also show that the quadrature squeezing angle suggests a possible route towards quantum non-demolition readouts, while further investigation is required for a full first-order suppression. We then connect our work to the well-studied AC-Stark shift and Bloch-Siegert shift using the effective Hamiltonian theory. Finally, we show how the energy shifts and the conditional squeezing arise, as a whole $\mathrm{SU}(1,1)$ algebra, and how they can be disentangled as individual unitary evolutions.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Stochastic Reaction Networks Within Interacting Compartments with Content-Dependent Fragmentation

arXiv:2511.10223v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic reaction networks with mass-action kinetics provide a useful framework for understanding processes – biochemical and otherwise – in homogeneous environments. However, cellular reactions are often compartmentalized, either at the cell level or within cells, and hence non-homogeneous. We investigate a model of compartmentalization in which the rate of fragmentation of a compartment depends on the abundance of some designated species inside that compartment. The particular model of study is part of a general framework for compartmentalized chemistry with dynamic compartments that was proposed in (Duso and Zechner, PNAS, 2020). This paper builds on (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) where the special case where the compartment dynamics do not depend on their contents was studied mathematically. In particular, we demonstrate that the explosivity characterization from (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) fails in this setting and provide new sufficient conditions for non-explosivity and positive recurrence, under the assumption that the underlying CRN admits a linear Lyapunov function. These results extend the theoretical foundation for modeling content-mediated compartment dynamics, with implications for systems such as cell division and intracellular transport.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

KANEL\'E: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Efficient LUT-based Evaluation

arXiv:2512.12850v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Low-latency, resource-efficient neural network inference on FPGAs is essential for applications demanding real-time capability and low power. Lookup table (LUT)-based neural networks are a common solution, combining strong representational power with efficient FPGA implementation. In this work, we introduce KANEL\'E, a framework that exploits the unique properties of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for FPGA deployment. Unlike traditional multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), KANs employ learnable one-dimensional splines with fixed domains as edge activations, a structure naturally suited to discretization and efficient LUT mapping. We present the first systematic design flow for implementing KANs on FPGAs, co-optimizing training with quantization and pruning to enable compact, high-throughput, and low-latency KAN architectures. Our results demonstrate up to a 2700x speedup and orders of magnitude resource savings compared to prior KAN-on-FPGA approaches. Moreover, KANEL\'E matches or surpasses other LUT-based architectures on widely used benchmarks, particularly for tasks involving symbolic or physical formulas, while balancing resource usage across FPGA hardware. Finally, we showcase the versatility of the framework by extending it to real-time, power-efficient control systems.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Analyzing Initialization Strategies for the Local Unitary Cluster Jastrow Ansatz within the Quantum-Centric Supercomputing Framework

arXiv:2606.14933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this study, we analyze the choice of local unitary cluster Jastrow (LUCJ) ansatz initialization and sensitivity of the sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD) algorithm within the quantum-centric supercomputing (QCSC) framework. We examine six initialization strategies, including those based on coupled-cluster singles and doubles (CCSD), M{\o}ller-Plesset second-order perturbation theory (MP2), data-driven coupled-cluster (DDCC), and trivial (zeroes and random) initializations, across twelve molecular systems and three basis sets (STO-3G, cc-pVDZ, and aug-cc-pVDZ). We find that while the mean absolute percentage errors (MAPEs) between the alternative and CCSD-initialized t2-amplitudes span many orders of magnitude, the resulting SQD energies are largely insensitive to this variation. In particular, most initializations recover energies within chemical accuracy (+/-1.6 mEh) of the CCSD reference, with convergence improving as the basis set size increases. Notably, random initialization achieves performance competitive with CCSD across all basis sets, while zeroes initialization, despite having smaller deviations from CCSD, yields the worst energy agreement. Our results highlight that the proximity to the CCSD initialization is not a reliable predictor of the quality of electronic energies. These findings establish that configuration recovery within SQD, rather than circuit initialization, is the dominant factor governing energy accuracy, and suggest that computationally cheaper initialization strategies are viable alternatives to CCSD for QCSC workflows

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Machine Unlearning for the XGBoost Model with Network Intrusion Datasets

arXiv:2606.19220v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine Unlearning (MU) has emerged as an important technique for removing specific data points from trained models without requiring full retraining. However, most existing MU research focuses on deep learning and image data, leaving a gap in the domain of network intrusion detection, which relies heavily on tabular data. This work introduces XGBoost-Forget, an unlearning approach for the XGBoost model, to address this gap. The approach is evaluated on two tabular Network Intrusion (NI) datasets, IoT-23 and GeNIS, using multiple metrics to assess model performance, unlearning efficiency, and forgetting quality. The results show that XGBoost-Forget maintains predictive performance close to the original model while providing significantly faster unlearning, demonstrating its potential for MU in tabular NI settings.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Vision-language models for chest radiography do not always need the image

Medical vision-language models report strong chest radiograph accuracy, and this is increasingly read as evidence that they use the image. That inference is unsafe: a model exploiting finding-name priors scores like one that reads the scan, and no standard benchmark separates them. We introduce a causal audit that intervenes on the image, occluding the relevant region, occluding an irrelevant one, and swapping in another patient's same-label scan, and combines three behavioral metrics to test whether a correct answer depends on the image. Across nine systems, a text-only model with no image access reaches within 5.7 accuracy points of the best multimodal one, and a 119-billion-parameter multimodal model is statistically indistinguishable from a 7-billion text-only baseline. The audit splits the cohort into three models that ignore the image, one that is unstable, and five that use it selectively, for a subset of findings; the categories hold across a second dataset, resolution, and prompt phrasing. Against board-certified radiologists, a text-only model is statistically indistinguishable from a radiologist's accuracy while grounding at zero, whereas the image-using models ground at radiologist-comparable rates. Reported confidence flags ungrounded answers only when a model uses the image. Grounding audits, not accuracy, should gate clinical deployment.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

TifBERT: a self-supervised foundation model for normalization-robust bulk RNA-seq representation learning

Bulk RNA sequencing remains central to translational genomics, yet foundation-model development has largely focused on single-cell data. Existing transformer approaches for bulk RNA-seq often rely on expression discretization, numerical reconstruction, external gene embeddings, or restricted gene sets, limiting robustness across normalization schemes and cohorts. Here, we introduce TifBERT, a self-supervised framework for full-transcriptome bulk RNA-seq representation learning. TifBERT converts each unordered expression profile into a sample-specific gene sequence using term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) ordering, prioritizing genes that are both highly expressed within a sample and selectively expressed across the cohort. It is then pretrained using masked gene modeling, predicting gene identities from transcriptomic context rather than reconstructing expression values. Pretrained on harmonized TCGA Pan-Cancer data spanning five RNA-seq normalization schemes, TifBERT learns contextual representations across approximately 10,000 genes without expression binning, landmark-gene restriction, or external biological embeddings. Across 33 TCGA cancer types, TifBERT achieved 90.83% accuracy, 0.996 macro AUC-ROC, and 0.903 MCC. It also captured pathway-level biology, achieving mean sample-wise and pathway-wise Pearson correlations of 0.754 and 0.762 across 1,387 PARADIGM pathway activities. Independent evaluation on GTEx healthy tissues showed preservation of tissue-level transcriptomic structure without retraining. In comparison with existing models, TifBERT achieves competitive subtype discrimination with substantially greater stability and produces markedly richer embedding geometry (effective rank 95.6 versus 6.3), without requiring expression discretization or in-distribution pretraining exposure. Together, TifBERT provides a scalable, normalization-independent foundation model for reusable bulk transcriptomic representation learning

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

From Awareness to Adherence: Bridging the Context Gap in Spoken Dialogue Systems via Context-Aware Decoding

Despite the success of end-to-end (E2E) spoken dialogue systems, maintaining strict context adherence in multi-round conversations remains a challenge. While prior works attribute these failures to models forgetting dialogue history, we highlight an equally critical but overlooked bottleneck: a gap between latent context awareness and active adherence. Although models internally recognize relevant past utterances, strong parametric priors often overshadow these signals during decoding. To bridge this gap, we propose an audio-adapted Context-Aware Decoding (CAD) approach. By leveraging internal attention mechanisms to isolate key historical rounds, our approach contrasts output distributions with and without this key context during inference, directly amplifying multimodal contextual signals. Evaluations on the Audio MultiChallenge benchmark demonstrate significant improvements in Semantic Memory and Self Coherence subtasks, successfully enforcing strict, context-faithful adherence.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

In-Context Learning Is Provably Bayesian Inference: A Generalization Theory for Meta-Learning

arXiv:2510.10981v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops a finite-sample statistical theory for in-context learning (ICL), analyzed within a meta-learning framework that accommodates mixtures of diverse task types. We introduce a principled risk decomposition that separates the total ICL risk into two orthogonal components: Bayes Gap and Posterior Variance. The Bayes Gap quantifies how well the trained model approximates the Bayes-optimal in-context predictor. For a uniform-attention Transformer, we derive a non-asymptotic upper bound on this gap, which explicitly clarifies the dependence on the number of pretraining prompts and their context length. The Posterior Variance is a model-independent risk representing the intrinsic task uncertainty. Our key finding is that this term is determined solely by the difficulty of the true underlying task, while the uncertainty arising from the task mixture vanishes exponentially fast with only a few in-context examples. Together, these results provide a unified view of ICL: the Transformer selects the optimal meta-algorithm during pretraining and rapidly converges to the optimal algorithm for the true task at test time.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum statistical enhancement of collective behaviour in a bosonic active Ising model

arXiv:2606.18091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collective behaviour such as flocking (the collective motion of a spontaneously formed group along a common direction) or aster formation (the binding of opposing flocks, inhibiting each others motion) are intriguing emergent phenomena in active systems with local alignment rules. Until recently, their occurrence was mainly studied for classical systems, a prime example being the active Ising model (AIM), which translates the main ingredients of flocking and aster formation (i.e., alignment and self-propulsion) to a lattice framework. Here we introduce and study a one-dimensional (1D) quantum lattice variant of the AIM, based on ideal bosons with a spin degree of freedom. We find that both the collective behaviours of the 1D classical model, flocking and aster formation, are markedly enhanced by the bosonic quantum statistics. This contrasts with a recent quantum generalization of the AIM based onto hard-core bosons [Khasseh et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 248302 (2025)], where flocking, but neither its quantum-statistical stabilization nor aster states were observed as a consequence of interactions. Moreover, we investigate the competition of this quantum statistical stabilization of collective phases with their suppression by the quantum fluctuations induced by a transverse external magnetic field.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Possibilistic Predictive Uncertainty for Deep Learning

Deep neural networks achieve impressive results across diverse applications, yet their overconfidence on unseen inputs necessitates reliable epistemic uncertainty modeling. Existing methods for uncertainty modeling face a fundamental dilemma: Bayesian approaches provide principled estimates but remain computationally prohibitive, while efficient second-order predictors lack rigorous connections between their specific objectives and epistemic uncertainty quantification. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce Dirichlet-approximated possibilistic posterior predictions (DAPPr), a principled framework grounded in possibility theory. We define a possibilistic posterior over parameters, project it to the prediction space via supremum operators, and approximate the projected posterior using learnable Dirichlet possibility functions. This projection-and-approximation strategy yields a simple training objective with closed-form solutions. Despite its simplicity, extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks show that DAPPr achieves competitive or superior uncertainty quantification performance over state-of-the-art second-order predictors while maintaining both principled derivation and computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/MaxwellYaoNi/DAPPr.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Implicit Semantic-Aware Communication Based on Hypergraph Reasoning

arXiv:2606.20162v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Semantic-aware communication has emerged as a transformative paradigm for next-generation communication systems, shifting the fundamental goal from transmitting bit-level symbols to reliably recovering and understanding the semantic meaning of information. Previous studies have demonstrated that representing the semantic content of source messages as graph-based structures can significantly improve communication efficiency and the accuracy of semantic inference at the receiver. However, existing solutions typically employ graphs that capture only pairwise relationships, thereby neglecting higher-order implicit correlations commonly observed in real-world scenarios, such as group interactions, multi-entity associations, and complex relational contexts. This limitation reduces semantic expressiveness and makes semantic inference susceptible to ambiguity and performance degradation, particularly under noisy or corrupted channel conditions. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel hypergraph-based implicit semantic reasoning framework, HISR, which leverages hypergraphs to represent complex multi-entity relationships among semantic knowledge entities. In HISR, entities and their associated higher-order relations are mapped into dedicated semantic subspaces tailored to distinct relational contexts. This design not only disentangles diverse semantic interactions to mitigate the over-smoothing effects commonly found in traditional graph embedding methods but also enables robust semantic inference even when partial information loss occurs during transmission. Numerical results show that the proposed HISR achieves up to a 36.6% improvement in implicit semantic interpretation accuracy over the state-of-the-art benchmarks.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Teaching Values to Machines: Simulating Human-Like Behavior in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a remarkable capacity to adopt different personas and roles; however, it remains unclear whether they can manifest behavior that adheres to a coherent, human-like value structure. In this work, we draw on established psychological value theory to induce human-like values in LLMs and assess their alignment with patterns observed in human studies. Using validated psychological questionnaires, we conduct large-scale experiments – over 5 million questions – to evaluate value structures and value-behavior relationships in leading LLMs and compare them to humans. Our findings reveal strong agreement between value-prompted LLMs and humans across both dimensions. Moreover, incorporating human value distributions enhances population-level simulations with value-induced LLMs. These findings highlight the potential of value-induced LLMs as effective, psychologically grounded tools for simulating human behavior.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Device assessed 24-hour movement behaviour and cardiovascular disease mortality amongst cancer survivors.

Background: Cancer survivors face elevated risks of mortality from cardiovascular disease (CVD). The potential importance of physical activity (PA) and other behaviours across the 24-hour day (e.g. sedentary behaviour (SB) and sleep) for CVD-mortality risk is not well understood in this at-risk population. Objectives: To assess the importance of 24-hour movement behaviour, using a compositional approach, for mitigating CVD-mortality amongst cancer survivors. Methods: Participants with a prior cancer diagnosis were drawn from the UK Biobank accelerometry sub-study (n=6,158). Accelerometer-derived movement (moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA), vigorous PA (VPA), moderate PA (MPA), light PA (LPA), SB, sleep) was examined in relation to CVD-mortality, identified from health record linkage data (using Fine-Gray Cox proportional-hazards models adjusted for demographic, health, lifestyle covariates). Results: Median follow-up was 8.0 years (Q1-Q3: 7.4-8.5), with n=500 (8.2%) deaths (CVD-deaths: n=118). Greater MVPA, in place of any other behaviour, was inversely associated with CVD-mortality with e.g. 10% lower hazard if MVPA theoretically replaced 7 minutes (mins)/day SB (Hazard ratio (HR): 0.91, (95% Confidence Interval: 0.86-0.95)), 9 mins/day LPA (HR: 0.90, 0.83-0.97), or 11 mins/day sleep (HR: 0.90, 0.83-0.97). The VPA component of MVPA proved critical, requiring only ~1-2 additional mins/day for equivalent hazard reduction. Sleep duration, was also inversely associated with CVD-mortality. A 10% lower hazard required replacing 29 mins/day of SB with sleep (HR: 0.90, 0.84-0.96); no other behavioural replacement amongst SB, sleep or LPA could provide an equivalent risk reduction. Conclusions: Among cancer survivors, the most potent reduction in CVD-mortality followed theoretically reallocating time to higher intensity movement.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Towards Understanding What State Space Models Learn About Code

arXiv:2602.06774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to the Transformer architecture. Prior work shows that, when trained under comparable conditions, SSMs can match or surpass Transformers on code understanding tasks. However, their internal mechanisms remain a black box. We present the first systematic analysis of what SSM-based code models learn along with the direct comparison between SSM and Transformer models in this domain. Our analysis shows that SSMs capture syntactic and semantic structure more effectively than Transformers during pretraining but forgets certain relations during fine-tuning on some tasks. To investigate this behavior, we introduce SSM-Interpret, a frequency-domain framework that exposes a spectral shift toward short-range dependencies during fine-tuning. Guided by these findings, we propose architectural modifications that significantly improve the performance of SSM-based code model by upto +6 MRR on NLCodeSearch. This demonstrates that our analysis not only explains model behavior but also leads directly to better designs.

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Probing picometre-scale interlayer deformations via hyperbolic polaritons

作者:

The resilience of van der Waals (vdW) materials to large strain fields makes them an ideal platform for tuning electronic, optical and magnetic properties1–4. Although in-plane strain is readily mapped, non-invasive and quantitative characterization of out-of-plane strain remains a formidable challenge, particularly for picometre-scale deformations buried at interfaces. Here we demonstrate a polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons (oHPs) mode to detect interlayer deformations in prototypical vdW polar insulator–hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). This method uses the softening mechanism of out-of-plane transverse optical (oTO) phonons induced by interlayer strain, enabling highly sensitive detection of picometre-scale deformations. Although these oTO phonon modes are typically spectroscopically ‘dark’, their strain response is activated through the oHPs, achieving an atomic displacement sensitivity of about 10 pm (about 8 × 10−7 times the probing wavelength), enabling ultradeep-subwavelength mechanical interlayer deformation detection. This is experimentally validated in both planar hBN and at the buried interface of quantum dot–hBN nanotube heterostructures. This polariton-based picometrology bridges nanomechanics and photonics, providing a non-destructive lens to visualize hidden stress landscapes with atomic precision. A new polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons mode is described and experimentally validated to allow the examination of picometre-scale interlayer deformations, providing a bridge between nanomechanics and photonics.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Semantics-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.14941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting models often benefit from historical patterns. Inspired by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), recent research explored retrieving relevant historical time series segments to enhance forecasting. However, relying solely on time series similarity is often insufficient for retrieval under non-stationarity. To address this, we propose a multimodal approach: a Semantics-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting framework, SERAF. Unlike mainstream approaches that depend only on time series similarity, SERAF conducts dual retrieval over the time series and their self-generated textual descriptions. It retrieves two complementary sets of historical patterns and corresponding futures, which are selectively and jointly used to guide future predictions. Experiments across seven real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SERAF in bridging numerical and semantic views of time series compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Edu-Theater: A Data-Efficient Agent Framework for Scalable Learner Behavior Simulation through Staging Roll-Call

arXiv:2606.15225v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale learner-task interaction data are crucial for intelligent educational systems but are costly to collect and constrained by privacy and learner engagement. Learner simulators play a critical role in simulating scalable learner behavior without the need for continuous involvement of real learners. However, existing methods are predominantly individual-centric, pairing a simulator with each learner to iteratively infer latent knowledge states from dense interaction histories, which is both data- and computation-intensive, and fragile in cold-start scenarios. We propose a cohort-aware roll-call simulation paradigm that first constructs cohort-level proficiency priors and refines individual learner states through a small number of targeted diagnostic queries. Based on this paradigm, we introduce Edu-Theater, an LLM-powered agent system that performs cohort-aware learner simulation via a teacher agent and retrospective roll-call probing over learner logs. Edu-Theater enables scalable future behavior simulation without the need for dense per-learner histories. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that Edu-Theater achieves higher simulation accuracy with significantly fewer LLM calls, producing synthetic data that enhances downstream applications such as adaptive testing.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Rethinking Psychometric Evaluation of LLMs: When and Why Self-Reports Predict Behavior

Anticipating LLM behavioral tendencies from low-cost psychometric probes is critical for safe deployment, but only if self-reports (SR) reliably predict behavior. Recent work documented substantial SR-behavior dissociation in LLMs, but relied on broad personality traits (Big 5) that predict specific behaviors weakly, even in humans. Furthermore, the isolation of conversational sessions combined with weak context matching left open whether LLMs truly lack coherence or whether the conditions needed to detect such coherence were not met. We contrast Big 5 with the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), which measures intention targeted to a specific behavior and predicts human behavior substantially better than broad traits. We run experiments across four behavioral tasks and 11 frontier LLMs, while also varying session context and identity induction. We find that SR-behavior coherence exists but is selective. 1) Within a shared conversation, the Theory of Planned Behavior reaches human-level coherence; Big 5 does not. 2) Across separate conversations, coherence survives only for behaviors anchored outside the immediate prompt, such as implicit bias shaped by training, and collapses when behavior is strongly primed by context, as with sycophancy. 3) Persona prompting makes self-reports more consistent across conversations, but does not bring behavior into alignment. These findings suggest that coarse personality frameworks, such as Big 5 may not be the best tools for testing deployment behavior. More task- and behavior-specific instruments are needed, and even these must be evaluated across tasks and contexts.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Adaptive Inference-Time Scaling via Early-Step Latent Verification for Image Editing

Instruction-based image editing has made notable progress with recent advances in generative models. However, the quality of the edited result is still influenced by the randomly sampled initial noise, particularly in complex editing scenarios. An unsuitable initial noise may lead to unsatisfactory editing results. Recent inference-time scaling methods address this issue by sampling multiple initial noises and selecting better candidates. Nevertheless, most of them follow a decode-then-verify scheme which introduces an efficiency-accuracy trade-off. When decoding is performed after limited inference steps, the decoded images often remain too noisy for reliable assessment, whereas sufficiently denoised images require much higher computational cost. To address this issue, we propose VeriLatent, a plug-and-play adaptive inference-time scaling framework with early-step latent verification for image editing. Specifically, we propose a novel verifier that scores each initial noise through a latent-space editing activation map at an early stage. It identifies promising candidates by assessing whether they can induce an effective edit in the correct region. This enables efficient early pruning without decoding latents into images. Building on this, we further develop an adaptive search strategy for inference-time scaling. It allocates inference budgets according to editing difficulty, thereby reducing the number of function evaluations (NFE). Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and different base models demonstrate that VeriLatent consistently improves both editing performance and inference-time scaling efficiency.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Optimal Sparsification of Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2606.19763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove an optimal dimension-free sparsification theorem for suprema of centered Gaussian processes. Given a bounded set $T\subseteq\mathbb{R}^n$, we show that the supremum of the canonical Gaussian process on $T$ can be $L^2$-approximated by the supremum of a shifted subprocess indexed by only $\exp(O(1/\varepsilon^2))$ points, with error at most $\varepsilon$ times the Gaussian width of $T$. In particular, the size of the approximating process is independent of both the ambient dimension and the cardinality of the original index set. This improves a recent sparsification theorem of De, Nadimpalli, O'Donnell, and Servedio (2026) by an exponential factor, and we show that the dependence on $\varepsilon$ is tight up to constants in the exponent. As consequences, we obtain an exponentially improved junta theorem for norms over Gaussian space and sharpen results on learning, property testing, and polyhedral approximation of convex sets under the Gaussian measure. The proof is based on an interpolation argument that combines Sudakov's minoration with the Brascamp–Lieb inequality.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DeePEn - A Depth sensitive benchmark for Protein Engineering

Recent progress in modeling techniques and high-throughput screening has significantly enhanced the accessibility of protein engineering. Nevertheless, further progress gets hindered by the lack of robust benchmarks that capture the practical challenges for real-world protein engineering. Here, we introduced DeePEn, a Depth-sensitive benchmark for Protein Engineering that quantifies a models generalization capabilities when predicting protein fitness at increasing mutational distance from the wildtype or training data. We defined distance as the number of simultaneous point mutations, i.e., single amino acid variants (SAVs), moving from wild-type to mutant (edit distance in computer science jargon). Specifically selecting four deep mutational scanning (DMS) datasets with sufficient multi-mutation data points from ProteinGym, we assessed recent predictive models, including general and biophysics-informed protein Language Models (pLMs), and a non-transformer neural network. Our results highlight how the performance of all models deteriorates with increasing mutational distance and that no single metric sufficiently captures the diverse requirements of protein engineering. To overcome these shortcomings, DeePEn provides a readily available resource for multi-metric benchmarking that focuses on the prediction of distant variants.